God’s calling is a majestic thing. To be summoned by the divine mind in order to accomplish God’s will is not a small thing; it is what our very lives are made for. God created us to fulfill His will by following His teaching and to present Him to the world as the Redeemer. A huge problem that we...

There is a stark difference between erring while trying to worship God, and worshipping idols instead of God. God’s people had gone from bad to worse, despite His many warnings and messages to them, and the results were devastating. The LORD punished the people of Israel because they had left the...

The book of the prophet Joel comes after the book of Hosea and represents prophecies given by the man of the same name. Joel means, “Yah is God” and his book is only 73 verses long, making it one of the shortest in the entire Old Testament. The time of Joel is disputed, it is likely from before t...

There are a total of 21 verses in the English rendering of the Biblical book of Obadiah. The name Obadiah means “Servant of Yahweh”. While we have very little information about the man who wrote Obadiah, it seems that the best historical fit for his vision is sometime after the fall of Jerusalem,...

God’s willingness to forgive is the main theme of the Biblical book of Jonah. Jonah is one of the Old Testament prophets that not only has his own book but is also mentioned in the history of 2 Kings 14:25. It is very clear that Jonah was a man who knew the abuse of the Assyrians and hated them f...

Prophecy is a word that carries a lot of definitions. It creates excitement and curiosity in some, while suspicion and fear in others. We must discipline ourselves not to follow our emotional responses, but to learn and understand how God uses prophecy and defines prophets. With something that ca...

What do we do when our foundations fall and our morality as a society fails? The psalmist asks a great question, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (PS. 11:3). This echoes a lament for Israel’s sins recorded in Micah 7. Micah seems depressed, he seems to believe that a...

About 150 years after the prophet Jonah had reluctantly and bitterly preached to the Assyrians in Nineveh, the prophet Nahum is called to do the same. Though Nineveh had repented after Jonah’s message, they had apparently stopped following God. Now, like Jonah, Nahum had to let them know that the...

The prophet Haggai challenged the people in Jerusalem to return to God. He urged them to take a good look at the way they were living and change to please God according to His laws. Haggai spoke to them about the holiness of God and how God desired the people to be holy too. Haggai was living aft...

The prophet Zechariah returns to Judah with the former exiles and has visions of Israel’s future. His overall message is both challenging and encouraging to the Israelites. Zechariah’s first and main emphasis was not the rebuilding of structures, but a return to the covenant between God and His p...

Sometimes it is hard to hear the plain truths of the Scripture over the sound of our own ideas. We all have things that we want to be true, meanings that we import into our understanding of the Bible. We need to develop an honest relationship with God in which we are bold enough to lay open our h...

The prophet begins to speak to Israel about the future. The next few chapters of Zechariah are a fascinating display of what God will do. Some of it has already happened, while other sections remain to be fulfilled. Zechariah, the person, was a contemporary of Haggai and is mentioned in Nehemiah ...

Not all Biblical prophecy has been fulfilled; there are several significant times still predicted. God does not lie; His Word can be checked historically, and so we can have confidence that these prophecies will come to pass. The Day of the LORD is one such future event during which God will reve...

Prayer is talking to God. Very often, the concept of prayer gets over complicated, involves ritual, pagan gods, and many unbiblical practices. It is interesting then, that Jesus Christ’s response to His disciples’ question about prayer was recorded in the Bible. Matthew, chapter 6, begins with Je...

Many people prefer to listen to the Law of God rather than hearing the Spirit of God behind the law. It seems easier to follow a set of laws or rules; we can measure our accomplishments and get a sense of self-value this way. However, when we are faced with the reality of Who Jesus Christ is, whe...

In His day, Jesus Christ taught the people what it meant to serve the LORD with their lives. The truth is, He is still teaching us today through His Word. The Bible records what Jesus Christ said and did, which helps us construct our lives in His direction, not in our own purpose. When we come to...

There is a big push today for our individual rights for free speech, as a response to modern culture’s attempts to squelch the way we think and speak. There are some who call this generation a snowflake generation of people because they seem to have no ability to deal with those who do not think ...

Children are amazing! Everyone loves to see children in their free environment enjoying and expressing themselves. Jesus Christ is God, and He made us, as humans, to procreate. If we believe what the Bible says, we understand that we were not created by accident or by chance, but by the very thou...

The “abomination of desolation” is first mentioned by Daniel (DANIEL 9:27, 11:31, 12:11) and two other times in the Gospels (MATTHEW 24:15, MARK 13:14). Many scholars point to the intertestamental era in 167 BC as the abomination of desolation when Antiochus IV Epiphanes invaded Jerusalem and ere...

One of the more amazing things about the Bible is its commitment to honesty. The disciples of Christ are not put forward as supermen who have no troubles or hang ups like many others in different religions. If we read the Bible as is, and do not attempt to modify it in any way, then we discover t...

The story of Jesus’ conviction and death is tragic and awful, humanly speaking, but is vital to our relationship with God. There are very few scholars who doubt that He lived and died. However, the problem arises with the claims that Jesus Christ rose from the dead in the flesh. A study published...

The Gospel of Mark is probably the first Gospel ever written. Scholars believe it was written around AD 64-68. The memories of Peter were written by John Mark. He was an important assistant for Peter and Paul. According to tradition, Peter was put to death in Rome under Emperor Nero. It seems tha...